Unintended Consequences:  The Story of Irish Immigration to the U.S. and How America’s Door was Closed to the Irish

By Ray O'Hanlon

First ever history of Irish emigration to the US and how radical changes to US immigration policy by JFK created the current community of ‘undocumented’ Irish.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785373800

Ray O'Hanlon

Ray O’Hanlon is the editor of the New York City-published Irish Echo newspaper. A native of Dublin, O’Hanlon has reported from four continents in a newspaper career spanning forty-one years. In addition to his work as a reporter and editor, O’Hanlon has been a frequent contributor to US, Irish and British media outlets reporting on Ireland, Irish American affairs, and Anglo-Irish relations. His book The New Irish Americans (1998) was the recipient of a Washington Irving Book Award, and The South Lawn Plot, his first fiction work, was published in 2011.

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CHAPTER 1

Searching for a Savior

Why were they here?

Why were they cheering, clapping, whistling and bursting into chants of olé, olé olé? Why, behind the near physical sense of purpose and oneness, were they all so worried? Worried about their futures, their kids, their homes and businesses, their lives in America.

The American dream, like any dream, is harder to live than it is to imagine. But when it is hard even to imagine, you don’t hesitate to reach out and grasp for something, for a feeling of hope, a prospect of a more certain tomorrow. And if that prospect is buoyed by the presence of one of the most influential politicians in the land, where else would you be on a night such as this, the first of the twelfth month in the year 2006.

So it was to this hall that they came, from the city and the suburbs, and beyond. They had names that could be traced back to every corner of Ireland. Their accents varied, but they were all talking about the same thing: a legal life in America. The hall, attached to a Catholic church, came with a name, St Barnabas, an early disciple, described in the Acts of the Apostles as a Cypriot Jew.

Few if any would have made the link. The man they had come to hear speak in this Christian place was a Jew. His name was Charles Schumer, often referred to as ‘Chuck’, and formally addressed as ‘Senator’. On this night he was both.

To the organizers of the event he was very much the Capitol Hill powerhouse politician, a man of potentially boundless force and influence. To Schumer himself, when it came to speaking to his audience, there was more of the Chuck, the friendly neighborhood pol with so many Irish staff members that he might as well have been, well, Edward Kennedy.

But he wasn’t – though there was talk of Edward, or ‘Teddy’, in the room – another politician who had in his power, or so it seemed, the ability to throw a lifeline to the increasingly desperate throng. The room was filled with descendants of so many before them who had landed in America so effortlessly by comparison, at least in terms of American law.

All in the room that night weren’t too worried about the politician’s name, or his party affiliation. The title of US Senator was more than good enough for the throng – mostly Irish, but one interspersed with hopeful new arrivals from Mexico, Central America, Poland and other far flung places.

The Irish were not the major force they once were in American politics. But they were far from a spent force. And those leading the Irish part of the national campaign for reform and relief for as many as eleven million undocumented were very much conscious of the need for operating in a bigger tent.

So it wasn’t entirely a bad thing that it wasn’t Ted Kennedy on this night, but rather a senator with family origins to the east of Kennedy’s ancestral island off Europe’s western edge. Schumer certainly didn’t sound or look like he was out of place. He played to the crowd with a big grin on his face, at least at the start of the evening’s business. But his countenance would soon darken, his words uttered in a more urgent tone. He would look down and over the top of his eyeglasses. Before too long it was serious Schumer in full flow.

Schumer was, and remains, one of the most consummate of politicians, a legislator famous for his Sunday morning press conferences, perfectly pitched to any and all media on the week’s slowest news day. The quip about the most dangerous place in Washington being the space between Schumer and a camera is not that wide of the mark. Those in the hall who had heard this half-joke were hoping it was true. If you’re going to rely on someone in Washington to be your champion, best that he, or she, is feared as much as loved.

Schumer’s zeal for pulling journalists into his inner orbit had been evident for years. Long before he secured his Senate seat, when he was still a member of the House of Representatives, he would wear out shoe leather doing to reporters what they were often required to do themselves in the course of their work. That was door-stepping them – literally turning up at the door unannounced, wanting to sit down and talk about this, that, anything.

Tonight, however, Schumer was the invited guest and the talk was about something very specific: comprehensive immigration reform. Schumer, famously, makes sure to visit each of New York State’s sixty-two counties at least once a year. On this first night of December he was covering two of them. The St Barnabas hall (really a school gym used as a meeting hall) was in Bronx County, but a few paces outside the door would have you in Yonkers in Westchester County.

Schumer, in not a few respects, is a political micromanager. No issue seems too small, and none too big. The issue on the agenda at St Barnabas was big, very big, but with countless individual parts to it, parts that were people and their unrequited American lives. And if the crowd in the hall could be counted in hundreds, they were representative of millions. This was a good place for Charles Schumer then – indeed, a perfect place. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

That’s what everyone was hoping – not least the organizers, the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform (ILIR), a group that was a twenty-first century successor to the Irish Immigration Reform Movement (IIRM) of the 1980s and ’90s. It was a slightly different name, but it was very much the same issue: Irish physically present in America but legally on the outside looking in.

ILIR had called the meeting in the aftermath of that year’s midterm elections. It described the gathering as a kick-start for a renewed ‘Countdown To Victory’ campaign, one aimed at securing more Irish immigrant visas by means of a bipartisan reform bill that, all things going well, would take shape and win congressional approval in 2007.

‘We’re calling on all the undocumented to turn up and be counted. We can’t win this without the support of the undocumented. If they don’t turn out, people will think they have gone away’, Kelly Fincham, the ILIR executive director, told reporters in the run-up to the meeting. ILIR was planning another rally in Boston for Wednesday, December 13, while additional meetings were in the works for Philadelphia, San Francisco and Florida.

The undocumented did turn up at St Barnabas. The hall was filled to standing room only, with some spilling out onto the street. And though it was just a few weeks shy of Christmas, many were wearing just T-shirts emblazoned with words calling for the legalization of the Irish.

December 1, 2006 is something of a standout in New York meteorological history. The record shows that temperatures in the New York area reached a spring-like high of seventy degrees that day. The warmth had lasted into the evening, and indeed by the meeting’s scheduled starting time had started to spawn thunderstorms. With Schumer in full flow, thunderclaps erupted and lightning flashed outside. The rally had the air of some climactic scene from a Shakespeare play. But what act was it? First or final?

Regardless, it had quite an array of dramatis personae. US Representative Anthony Weiner, still in his political pomp, and former congressman Bruce Morrison (who had secured thousands of green cards for luckier Irish in the early 1990s) spoke, as did leaders of ILIR. Schumer, the main act, outlined a scenario that had the immigration reform saga within sight of a successful denouement, albeit assuming certain things happened, and certain things did not. All embraced the heady combination of optimism and caution, rallying cry and warning that Schumer outlined to his audience.

Schumer committed himself and his Democratic Party to the pursuit of a comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2007. Given Schumer’s pivotal role in securing his party’s congressional majorities in the recent midterm elections, this was no lightweight pledge. Schumer went so far as to proclaim ‘tiocfaidh ar lá’, Irish for ‘our day will come’ and for years a proclamation of intent for Irish republicans and a pledge of working towards a positive and desired result.

The significance of Schumer’s words, frequently interrupted by applause and cheering from the crowd, was compounded by the fact that New York’s senior senator had emerged from the recent midterm elections as one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party on Capitol Hill. And though his speech to what was a friendly home-state crowd sounded like just that, experienced observers in the room were in broad agreement that Schumer had sufficient clout to set in motion a debate geared towards producing the kind of comprehensive reform bill that would secure the signature of a seemingly sympathetic President George W. Bush.

A successful outcome to the reform debate, it was stated more than once to an assembly that included Irish diplomatic representatives, would depend on the bipartisan nature of a final bill. That reality, however, did not prevent Schumer from taking a few distinctly partisan swipes at those Republicans in the outgoing 109th Congress who had worked against reform and had campaigned against it in the months before the midterm elections.

‘The last time I spoke to you,’ said Schumer, ‘the Republican leadership was playing cheap games with immigration reform. Now they are in the minority and Schumer and Weiner are in the majority.’ The response from the audience was typical on an evening that witnessed a new surge of hope coursing through an ILIR campaign that had its high points and more pessimistic moments since the group was formally launched in a midtown Manhattan hotel exactly one year previously.

Schumer had been led into the hall by two pipers who had to duel it out with the crowd in the battle to best raise the rafters. It was heady stuff. And there were emotional moments amid the rhetoric. Two ILIR volunteers, introduced as Mary and Samantha, described what it was like to miss the funeral of a loved one, or spend another Christmas Day dominated by tearful transatlantic phone calls to family members in Ireland.

For the most part, the focus of the various speeches was on how immigration reform would be achieved. Little attention was paid to the question of why the meeting was taking place at all. It was no time for a history lesson. All eyes were looking ahead, though the energy coursing through the evening was fueled by years of frustration.

If the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was mentioned at all, it barely caused a moment’s pause on anyone’s part. Most people in the audience hadn’t even been born in 1965. But they were living in a time of consequence, right smack in the middle of a nine-year period (2002–11) in which Ireland would receive less than 15,400 Green Card visas out of ten million issued globally.

That, according to the ILIR’s calculation, was about 0.15 per cent of the US visas issued to the wider world in that timeframe. So those gathered in the church hall, almost all of them shut out of the exclusive 0.15 per cent club, cheered and applauded, dreamed and imagined. Some even prayed.

CHAPTER 2

Mustering for Battle

In the waning days of January 1969, members of a group called the American Irish National Immigration Committee (AINIC) gathered at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago to plan a course of action aimed at securing more US immigration visas for the Irish. Similar scenes would be played out in other US cities twenty years later, and indeed thirty and forty years on.

But while the calls for greater Irish access to the American dream would draw media attention and inspire some congressional sympathy in 1989 and 2009, the Hilton gathering would take place at a moment in time when an Irish call for a wider American immigration door seemed at odds with an American landscape that looked, in certain areas, as Irish as any part of the island three thousand miles to the north-east of the Statue of Liberty.

The year 1969 would see out a decade when the Irish of America scaled seemingly impossible heights. At its opening, the first Irish Catholic president was elected. At its closing, two of the three crew members on board Apollo 11 could claim some degree of Irish ancestry.

So what had the AINIC members so riled up at a time of year when even damp Ireland seemed a warmer prospect than frigid Chicago? Simply put, a group of American Irish and their Irish-born cousins were feeling discriminated against, marginalized, shut out. It wasn’t easy to get this message across. Not in the America of Vietnam and Watts; not in the America of Kent State, Bull Connor and Love Canal. There were a lot of problems, issues, anxieties. A lack of visas for the Irish didn’t seem to rank at the top of them, not even close.

Why the American Irish National Immigration Committee? Why the meeting in a city that had so recently witnessed a party convention that had morphed into a metaphor for a country deeply divided? And if so divided, why the need for more Irish, more outsiders, more immigrants?

In the answers to these questions, there was to be found the very essence of the United States and its fabled dream. No matter how bad things were in America, there would be people in other lands who would leave everything behind for a chance to live in one of its fifty states. The Irish were no different. When they imagined America, they could draw on a version of the place that was itself Irish. Every new Irish immigrant had the luxury of experiencing both a push and pull effect.

But by 1969 it was becoming more difficult to observe this phenomenon. That’s because it was hard to spot the Irish newcomers. There were hardly any of them about. The reason for this was a combination with a positive side and a negative one. By the end of the 1960s, economic activity on the divided island of Ireland was beginning to show the kind of vibrancy that had been elusive for centuries. This belated development would mean that fewer would have to emigrate. But fewer wasn’t all. Many Irish were still being pushed and pulled and, as it was for countless of their ancestors, the 1960s Irish felt the strongest social and economic pull coming from the United States of America.

Then it happened. In the middle of the decade, in 1965, a boom came down, a golden door was slammed shut. What was a pull became a counter-push. The Irish beneficiaries, like other European nationalities with a favorable visa quota system, found themselves about to be locked out.

Admittedly, what had once been a flood of transatlantic Irish migration had been reduced, by the mid-1960s, to a relative trickle. This was not altogether unwelcome, as an awakening Ireland needed its people. But the 1965 Immigration Reform and Nationality Act would advance the process of flow reduction to the point that Irish immigration to America would almost completely dry up.

In fiscal 1965, the Irish secured 5,378 visas, a number actually well below their quota allowance. In the following year, the total fell to 3,071. It dropped further to 2,665 in 1967 and rose slightly to 3,619 in fiscal 1968. 1969, the year AINIC members huddled in Chicago, the bottom began to fall out. What was coming down the pike was clearly discernible as the year opened, and it was a verifiable statistic at its close. Between July and December of that year, the number of US visas obtained by Irish immigrants was precisely 60.

In later years, Senator Edward Kennedy, a primary architect of the 1965 reform act, would speak of the ‘unintended consequences’ that the act would have for the Irish. A total of 60 visas in six months matched Kennedy’s assessment perfectly. It was such a low figure that many Irish and Irish Americans were certain that it had to be unintended – a mistake. Whether or not it was unintended, it was, beyond argument, a significant consequence for the Irish who failed to make the lucky threescore.

The 1960s was a tumultuous decade for many reasons. The end of meaningful Irish migration to America wasn’t one of the bigger headlines from those ten years. Far from it. But for the Irish, the negative consequences of immigration reform at the decade’s mid-point would reach far into the future. They would reach deep down into the collective Irish and Irish American psyche. And the headlines, over time, would indeed grow steadily bigger.

CHAPTER 3

1965: The Year of the New Divide

By the middle of the 1960s, the great divide that had once been the Atlantic Ocean had been bridged. Jet aircraft, more often than not American-made Boeings, had pulled Ireland and the United States closer than would have been imagined just a generation earlier. But while geographic distance as an impediment to travel was becoming less of an issue, a new geopolitical obstacle was looming in the form of a major departure from previous practice in US immigration law.

Still, with economic change becoming daily more evident in Ireland, and chilly relations between both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland seemingly defrosting – this against the backdrop of meetings on both sides of the border between their respective prime ministers – the most significant change to US immigration law in decades did not stir up the kind of reaction in Ireland that such a development would have generated in 1955, a mere ten years previously. Things were on the up in Ireland. There were more jobs and promises of yet more. The sitting government in Dublin was returned to power in an April election. The government in Belfast created a new ministry in charge of development. There was reason for hope on the island. Even more than that: there was reason, finally, to expect.

There was reason to expect much in America too: civil rights for all to go with two cars in the garage. That was the general idea, anyway. America was an extraordinary place in the eyes of people in most other nations, a vast land of astonishing contrast and sometimes glaring contradiction. American astronauts were by now halfway along their decade-long mission to reach the moon. Back on the ground, cities burned. There were jobs aplenty in the world’s largest economy, though soon enough a job might entail a uniform, a rifle and a flight to a country called Vietnam.

In April, as voters in Ireland signaled relative content with their political leaders and returned Seán Lemass as Taoiseach and leader of a majority Fianna Fáil government, President Lyndon Johnson asked a joint session of Congress to rid the United States of any and all remaining barriers to citizens who desired to vote. His appeal was broadcast on national television. That same month, the world’s first commercial communications satellite was launched into space. Early Bird would make it easier for people in Ireland to phone friends and family in the United States. Phoning a friend in America was one thing. Joining that friend would soon be quite another.

If the world seemed to be shrinking in 1965 – if a satellite orbiting at 22,300 miles could bring a war on one side of the planet into the living rooms of the other side – surely it would be no great task to get up and move a few thousand miles, not least those miles between Europe and America? By the opening days of October, that question would be answered. A long-open entry door for European travelers with one-way tickets would begin a proposed five-year process of closing. And what was no longer considered a great distance by telephone line or airline would again become an unbridgeable chasm defined more by terrestrial man-made law than by mere water and sky.

Back in Ireland, the water and sky part was what was attracting the greatest attention. More and more people were flying the Atlantic to America in passenger jets but, increasingly, it was not as emigrants.

In the first three months of 1965, 1,036 visas had been allocated to Irish applicants by the US Embassy in Dublin. Irish migration to the US was tailing off and was a mere trickle compared to the 1950s, a decade when Irish America paid host to one of the most concentrated periods of migration from Ireland in the history of that storied east-to-west passage.

More than a few of the new arrivals from Ireland had little or no inkling of the profound changes being pieced together in Washington. Indeed, as the debate reached its climax in Congress, those back in Ireland who were inclined to think of a future American life were a good deal less informed than they should have been in an age when television presented an array of shows to audiences in Mayo that would have been entirely familiar to viewers in Minnesota. That’s because most people in Ireland living outside the east coast area, or Northern Ireland – particularly those living in the western parts of the country, traditional springboards for large scale emigration – had access to only one television channel, the national broadcaster RTÉ.

For hard news from America and around the world there was still a heavy reliance on nationally distributed newspapers. And as the clock ticked down to the biggest change in US immigration law in living memory, there were no newspapers to be had. From July 2 to September 12, a printing strike closed down Ireland’s national dailies and an array of printing houses. There was, in those crucial months, a near total news blackout throughout the twenty-six counties of the Republic. British titles were available for sale, but unlike later years, there were no Irish editions of the main British titles. Irish visas for America didn’t quite make the grade for editors in ‘swinging’ Britain, so the coming sea change went largely unreported in Ireland during the printers’ work stoppage.

In Irish America, however, it was another story. The emergence in Congress of two bills, S.500 in the US Senate and HR 2580 in the House of Representatives, was raising an alarm among community members who advocated for a continuing clear passage to America for any and all Irish who wanted to make the Atlantic crossing. And there was an irony lurking in the background. The idea that the old ways of doing business were in the past, that the future of immigration was to be found in all corners of the globe and not just western and northern Europe, had for years been taking shape in one especially important Irish American grouping: the Brothers Kennedy.

CHAPTER 4

The Fading Drumbeat

In his memory, that sound of the drums beating slow time for the dead president is still carrying across the Potomac and up into the sloping meadows of Arlington National Cemetery. Each year, on the anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, many recall, or try to remember, where they were when they first heard of the president’s death. Michael McGrath thinks more of where he was when JFK was lowered into the ground. He was standing right beside the president’s grave, standing stock-still, his eyes fixed on the scene, drawing every detail into a young mind that had yet to reach 20 years of age.

Many don’t know, and many have forgotten, that twenty-four Irish soldiers comprised the front-line honor guard at the hallowed spot where the young president was laid to rest on November 25, 1963, three days after his death in Dallas. McGrath was one of those soldiers, a member of the Irish army cadet school’s guard of honor and rifle drill team.

In later years, McGrath would perform numerous duties and missions, both for the Irish army’s air corps and for the United Nations’ peacekeeping forces in the Middle East. But there never would be a mission quite like this first one, not for him and not for his comrades who, on that November day, represented a bond between Ireland and America that transcended national borders.

The journey to Washington for McGrath and his comrades started with a journey to Ireland for President Kennedy, the immigrant homecoming to beat all homecomings. A few months before his last day of life, Kennedy had made his never-to-be-forgotten visit to the land of his ancestors. One of the ceremonies attended by the American president was a wreath-laying ceremony at the 1916 memorial at Arbour Hill, in Dublin, during which the cadet school’s drill team went through its paces.

According to McGrath, Kennedy was so impressed that he requested a film of the drill, ‘He wanted to use our drill with his own honor guard.’ McGrath would rise to the rank of commandant (major) in the Irish Army Air Corps and would, after his retirement from military service, take up the post of first manager of Knock (later Ireland West) international airport.

Kennedy was sent a film of the Irish drill. His enthusiasm for it was apparently conveyed to Jackie Kennedy. ‘She made a request just a short while after the assassination for us to be at the funeral,’ McGrath said. ‘It came out of the blue and was conveyed through the Irish embassy in Washington. She felt that her husband would have wanted it.’ He continues, ‘It was highly unusual. The president’s own armed forces were moved aside to a certain extent to accommodate her wish. And she got her wish.’

Kennedy was assassinated on Friday, November 22. The following evening, Michael McGrath and the other members of the rifle drill team were still contemplating a night’s sleep in their barracks at the Curragh.

It was at about 11 p.m. that McGrath and the rest of his unit were unexpectedly ordered to report to the Curragh military college’s Pearse lecture hall. ‘We were all shocked by the president’s death but this was something that really left us astonished. So while we were saddened by what had happened, we also immediately realized that Ireland was about to be accorded the greatest of honors and that we would be representing our country,’ McGrath explained.

The surprise of the moment was soon replaced by the urgent need to work out the logistics of the operation. First and foremost were the rifles used in the drill. They were Lee Enfields. But these older rifles had just been replaced by new and shorter FN models. ‘All the old rifles were stored away and packed in grease,’ McGrath recalls. ‘We had to quickly take them out of storage, clean them up and bring them back to the required operational state. And all this in the middle of the night.’ The rifles were put in order and the cadets managed to snatch a couple of hours of sleep.

Sunday morning had barely dawned when they were up again for Mass, a quick breakfast, some rapid rifle drilling and a bus trip to Dublin airport, where an Aer Lingus Boeing 707 was ready to fly President Éamon de Valera and the rest of the official Irish delegation to the funeral in Washington. ‘None of us had passports, but we all had rifles and bullets,’ McGrath said. At the airport, the cadets formed a guard of honor for de Valera as he went on board the jet. De Valera shook McGrath’s hand during the presentation. Once the Irish president was on board, the cadets, led by their officers, piled on after him. So far as McGrath can recall, none of them had ever even flown before.

McGrath fell into a seat beside his close friend and fellow cadet Martin Coughlin. He remembers the emotions of the moment. ‘We were sad, anxious and elated,’ he said. ‘We were representing out country, flying across the ocean with our president in order to mourn and salute America’s president.’

The plane landed at Idlewild in New York, the airport that would soon be renamed after JFK. The Irish party didn’t need passports. They were met on the tarmac by US Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The plane refueled and flew to Dulles airport outside Washington. The Irish cadets were driven to Fort Myer in Virginia, a few minutes’ drive from Arlington National Cemetery. It was now Sunday afternoon.

The young Irish soldiers bedded down as best they could for the night. They were tired and jetlagged, but sleep was to prove elusive. First thing Monday morning, the cadets were roused for a full dress rehearsal at the graveside. ‘I remember they were still digging the president’s grave,’ McGrath said. ‘There was a gravedigger in the hole. I could see the top of his shovel coming out of the grave as he dug. We were ordered into our positions by an American general, at least three-star. We realized then that our position was to be right in front of the grave.’

After going through their drill, McGrath and his fellow cadets were bussed back to Fort Myer for breakfast. They were back at Arlington and in position by half past one that afternoon. ‘The press were there and the cameras were rolling so we all had to be in position,’ McGrath said. ‘Because of that we couldn’t stand at ease. We stood like statues for almost three hours.’

McGrath was tall, a shade over six foot, three inches. As a result, he was placed at one end of the line, in the second row. He was only a few feet from President Kennedy’s final resting place. As the afternoon – which he remembers as being cold and largely windless – wore on, McGrath became conscious of the sound of drums leading the caisson carrying the dead president. ‘The drums were coming closer and closer and later I could hear the horses’ hooves,’ he said. The arrival of the procession at the grave was the moment for the cadets to commence their drill. McGrath describes the scene:

I remember thinking, here we go, we’re on. How we performed the drill was of immense importance to us, here more than ever before. It was an old traditional funeral drill, the Queen Ann Drill, and it can’t be done with modern rifles. It is very precise, snappy and visually precise, both in sight and sound. You hear the clash of the hand hitting the rifle sling.

There was a moment when we all turned our heads left. I was looking straight into the eyes of Jackie Kennedy. It was heart wrenching. The drill then reached the point where we reversed arms and lowered our heads. It was the most solemn part, the salute to the dead.

The drill had passed off perfectly. All the orders had been given in Irish by Lieutenant Frank Colclough. At this point, the cadets raised their rifles in the air and fired three volleys over President Kennedy’s grave.

The role of the Irish cadets at the graveside is not obvious in many of the films showing the graveside ceremonies. McGrath himself is seen in a photograph taken by the Associated Press and included in a commemorative book entitled The Torch Is Passed. The cadet seen in front of McGrath is Leo Quinlan. McGrath says:

Waiting by the grave and listening to the drums seemed like an eternity at the time.

I can still hear those drums now. For me, and I think for the rest of us, they epitomized the overwhelming sadness of that day.

We were all emotionally charged up, but we had to keep it all in. We had to be at one hundred per cent because we owed it to the president, and our country.

We were deeply honored. It was the most significant event of our lives and the one thing we all go back to whenever we meet. I will never forget that day, every minute of it. I am immensely proud to have been there.

Over the years, McGrath kept newspaper clippings, copies of photographs and a memorial card for President Kennedy presented to the Irish cadets. But more than all these paraphernalia, Michael McGrath was in possession of extraordinary memories of a sad but standout moment in twentieth century history. It was witnessed by millions on television, but only a chosen few were at the place where the world said goodbye to John F. Kennedy. It was also a high moment in the relationship between two countries, one that had reached a rare altitude with the election of Kennedy to the presidency and a new depth of sadness when he was assassinated.

The presence of the Irish cadets at Arlington was also a salute to all the Irish of America, living and dead. But it would soon appear to be something of a false summit. Within a couple of years the idea of a passport-free flight across the Atlantic and a greeting at its end from the US Secretary of State would be replaced by a new barrier to travel for even those Irish with a passport. President Kennedy himself had a hand in this change of affairs. Over time, so would his brothers Edward and Robert.

CHAPTER 5

Teddy

It had always been Teddy. He was the beginning, the middle and the end of the story, the primus inter pares, the sine qua non, the main man. Teddy had taken away, but he could also give back. And he wanted to give back. Oh, how he wanted.

Senator Edward Kennedy has gone down in history, and lore, as one of the greatest legislators to ever walk the corridors and tunnels of Capitol Hill. For the Irish, be they Irish or American-born, Teddy was ‘The Man’, like the Edward G. Robinson character in ‘The Cincinnati Kid’. When it came to legislative gambits in Washington you would be a fool to bet against Teddy, at least most of the time.

This was later in his political career, of course, when he was performing solo without the support of his brothers John and Robert. But even when his brothers were alive, and he looked to some like the Kennedy family political afterthought, Teddy was giving consideration to immigration: how it had been, how it was, how it might be in the future.

And why not? Immigration was central to his family’s story – indeed, the very reason that he and his brothers had come into this world. Teddy – all the Kennedy brothers – could become sentimental when the family’s own experience of immigration was the subject for discussion. But sentimentality could only go so far. It could not get in the way of reworking the American immigrant story. So the Kennedys, led at first by John, set about the retooling of a system that had never been an open door, despite popular mythology.

America had always been selective as to who was allowed inside